As various industries continue the trend toward consolidation, corporate enterprises can commonly include various different business units, each of which may operate in different business sectors. Depending on the nature of a given enterprise and the various industries in which the business units operate, the business units may or may not operate in related industries. Nevertheless, there may be circumstances where it would be desirable to transition a given customer from one business unit to another in an integrated workflow.
In another growing trend, enterprises are increasingly outsourcing certain business functions to third parties, who in turn may perform these business functions for a number of different clients. Because these third parties may perform these or similar business functions for a variety of clients, these third parties may achieve efficiencies in performing these functions. These efficiencies may enable these third parties to offer these services to clients for less than the clients would spend to perform these services in-house. Examples of such outsourced services are call center functions.
Business enterprises typically include back-office computer systems that perform the bulk of the transactional processing germane to that business enterprise. Illustrative examples of such back-office systems can include web servers that push content to client browsers to support e-commerce transactions with customers, database servers that respond to queries, and on-line transaction processors (OLTPs) that handle transactions.
In a typical scenario wherein services are outsourced from one entity to another, or wherein a workflow is transitioned across two or more different entities, part of the scenario may include tightly integrating the back-office support systems that comprise the different entities. The process of tightly integrating these support systems can present a considerable challenge for several reasons. First, the two systems may be quite dissimilar from one another, and not designed to communicate with each other. Second, security issues may preclude tightly integrating the two systems. Accordingly, it may be appropriate to implement firewalls or the like to prevent one system from gaining unauthorized access to the other system. Third, any differences in corporate culture between the two entities are typically magnified when attempting to integrate the systems comprising these two entities, and can hinder the success of the entire integrating project. Fourth, if the two systems need to share high volumes of data to accomplish the integrated workflow, a high-bandwidth communications channel is established between the two systems. Such communications channels are typically expensive.
Other obstacles are omitted from the foregoing discussion for brevity and conciseness. Overcoming these challenges and obstacles to integrate the back-office systems of the two entities typically entails considerable time and expense. Expending this time and expense can make the entire outsourcing or workflow integration scenario less attractive to the two or more involved entities.